Early Autumn By The Swimming Pool
by Proton Star
Summary: After everything that happened in X-Men 3, Mystique waits for the X-Men to contact her. The person they send is not the person she expects.


Title: Early Autumn By The Swimming Pool

Author: Proton Star

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, Marvel do. This iteration is 20th Century Fox's. No money is being made from this.

Fandom: X-Men (most particularly X-Men: First Class, but also bits of X-Men 2 and 3)

Series: Part 4 of Becoming. Part 1 can be found here - s/9557059/1/The-Mind-Is-A-Fortress-And-Life-Is-A-Siege, part 2 can be found here s/11012804/1/All-The-Things-She-Said-Running-Through-My-Head and part 3 here - s/11374084/1/The-Turning-Of-The-Leaves

Characters: Mystique and Kurt Wagner.

Ratings/Warnings: PG-12. Mention of several off-screen character deaths.

Spoilers: For X-Men 2 and X-Men 3.

Notes: I started to write this after First Class, and was trying to tie it to the previous X-Men films. And then DOFP was released so everything has been thoroughly Jossed.

Summary: After everything that happened in X-Men 3, Mystique waits for the X-Men to contact her. The person they send is not the person she expects.

* * *

Mystique hadn't made herself difficult to find, she'd even sent a few clues to the School since they couldn't use Cerebro anymore. She was waiting for them to catch up with her at a hotel just over the border in New Jersey.

It had been easy enough to escape from the police and the FBI. They'd found her knocked out in the prison van and taken her to hospital. She took down the officer they'd put in her room to guard her, and then made her escape out of the window. It had felt strange, more dangerous that it should have, without her powers she felt vulnerable, physically, in a way she didn't normally when she climbed down buildings. She'd gone to ground, avoiding Angel in case the authorities had put a tracking device into her while she was incapacitated, and instead unearthed one of their old caches of money and fake identities. She'd felt like burning Erik's forged passport, see how he liked being left stranded, but decided against it. She could use it herself if her powers returned. At the time, that was still an if. She'd paid enough attention to Charles and Hank's research, and done a little reading of her own, and thought that it was possible that her powers wouldn't come back. She faced that threat head on. She had no qualifications, not as such, none that agreed with the age she looked, but it would be easy enough to fake the information. What could she do with herself though? That worried at her, awake and asleep. She'd spent so long fighting for mutants that finding a job seemed to be a strange and alien concept. It scared her, but not to point of not doing anything, which it might have done if she hadn't lost terror as an emotion some time ago, burned away in their never-ending war. Adapt and survive, it was what she was good at.

Then San Francisco happened, and the news was full of the "cure" - a pretty euphemism for a terrible thing - and an ex-Worthington Corp. scientist gave away slightly too much information, making it clear that it would wear off, but no-one could know exactly when.

Armed with that knowledge, she'd used the money to set herself up as a well-off recent divorcee and waited for someone to make contact. She suspected that Hank, or whoever was in charge of X-Men now, would want to find her. To tell her officially, if nothing else.

She had known the moment Charles had died, some tiny part of her brain registering the absence of a presence that had been anchored there, silently, for years. She suspected that Charles didn't even know he had that connection to her, that it had wormed its way in when they were young, because there had been times since then when he should have used it, and might have if he d known it had been there. Then again, he'd always been very good about not going into people's minds unless there was no other option, not realising they could have won this war with fewer casualties if he'd just been willing to do what was necessary.

She'd expected it to be Hank that came to tell her, not ... not the man she had to accept was her son. He was dressed to conceal himself, beige trench coat and matching fedora. If he'd been anyone else, she would have told him that he was only making himself look more suspicious, but there was a limit to what you could do when you're blue, have a tail and furry pointy ears. The weather made the disguise worse. It was warm enough that she was basically sunbathing next to the pool, which made his all-covering clothing stand out even more.

"Dr. McCoy sent me. He ... I ... that is to say ..." By now, Mystique could spot one of Hank's well-meaning but terrible ideas.

"I know." She didn't want Kurt to have to struggle further, trying to break bad news in what wasn't even his first language. "Charles is dead," Kurt looked confused by her reaction, not knowing her well enough to know that Mystique did her crying in private, "and Hank sent you because he thinks you're my son."

He shuffled uncertainly, as though he was trying to summon up the will to say something. "Am I?"

"Probably." It was the truth, but she felt that he deserved more of an answer. "I had a child who could have looked like you. They told me it was dead."

"Thank you. It explains the one thing I could never understand - why would any mother throw her child into a river? The priest who found me said she must have had a reason. And you did, because it wasn't you and you didn't know I existed." This docile, diffident church-child was hers and not like her or Azazel at all. They'd always fought for everything they had, and he seemed to accept things as they were. He appeared satisfied with her answer, as though everything now made sense. She'd had the opposite reaction once she'd had time to think after Alkali Lake. She was a soldier. She did her duty, then dealt with any fall-out once the mission was completed. There was only one logical way that everything that had happened could have happened, so it was easy enough to piece together. She had the advantage of knowledge and hindsight to be able to put it all together. Kurt couldn't really walk around asking every blue mutant if they were related to him, while Mystique recognised Kurt almost immediately, something not just of her, not just of Azazel, but both of them.

What the nuns had done was wrong. It had deprived her of so much, and yet. "I couldn't have kept you with us anyway, the front-line of a war is no place for a child." It's a decision she'd never had to make, what to do with their child. There had only been two options, give him to Charles, an image that almost caused her to laugh out loud, or to leave him with Angel, where him may not have had as many material things, but he would have been brought up properly, with love and attention, mutant and proud. He wouldn't have carved into his own flesh because of how he looked, whichever option she had taken.

This meeting was several years too late for both of them. He wanted to meet the woman that gave birth to him, and she'd spent the intervening time making sure she was never that vulnerable again. She can't be her again, that woman's been used as building blocks for who she is now. No trace remained of the original configuration.

Instead, she gave Kurt what she could. She told him about Azazel, about what they did, about why they did it, everything that she could remember Azazel telling her about himself. It wasn't a lot, Azazel was as taciturn as the rest of them, but she found herself smiling as she spoke, falling into the rhythm and intonation of Azazel, his peculiar stop-start cadence, without her face or vocal chords changing.

They'd been talking for a while when the pool attendant came over to ruin the mood and asked, "is the mutie bothering you, ma'am? I can have security throw him out."

Every cell in her body was trying to change into her real self and strangle the bastard. She can't quite do it, yet. The poisonous cure was slowly weakening, she'd woken up with yellow eyes twice this week. It's a comfort to know she'll be truly herself again soon. All she can do right now is say, "My son isn't bothering me at all," and watch the colour drain from the man's face.


End file.
